It is the best of times, it is the worst of times — for science. Over the past several years, the world has been spectator to an alarming meltdown as one serious scandal after another has publicly exposed many of the world’s most prestigious scientific organizations, institutions, and publications as being captives of rigid ideologues who employ rigged computer models, fraudulent “evidence,” censorship, and intimidation to advance a radical “green” political agenda and to squelch genuine scientific inquiry and debate.

Some of the preeminent scientists involved in promoting global-warming alarmism have been disgraced and discredited, after being caught in flagrante in unethical and illegal activities. Even before the 2009 “Climategate” e-mail scandal, many leading scientists who had earlier been true believers in man-made global warming (anthropogenic global warming, or AGW) had begun jumping ship and joining the AGW skeptic side. Since then, the defections have turned into a veritable flood, making this one of the great untold stories of the major establishment media, which continue to trumpet the alarmist propaganda.

Two defections were particularly striking as world leaders and tens of thousands of delegates, NGO activists, and journalists gathered in Rio de Janeiro in June for the United Nations Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development. In an interview with the U.K. Guardian on the eve of the summit, James Lovelock (photo above), the British inventor, NASA scientist, author, and originator of the Gaia Hypothesis, mocked sustainable development as “meaningless drivel,” and said the UN makes “a mess” of everything it gets involved with. In 2006, Lovelock, one of the world’s most famous environmentalist gurus, asserted that due to global warming “billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.” He now says his predictions were “alarmist,” and he criticizes his former comrades for having turned environmentalism into a “green religion.” Lovelock also endorses nuclear power and expanded development of natural gas through hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” But his ultimate heresy is his withering rejection of so-called “renewable energy,” especially wind power, as a viable replacement for carbon-based fuels. (See here and here).

“We rushed into renewable energy without any thought,” says Lovelock. “The schemes are largely hopelessly inefficient and unpleasant.” He has upset many of his erstwhile green brethren for attacking wind turbines and wind farms as “ugly and useless.”

Professor Fritz Vahrenholt is another recent green heretic. A founding father of Germany’s environmental movement and a director of one of Europe’s largest alternative energy companies, Vahrenholt stunned the "greens" in February of this year with publication of the climate-skeptic book Die Kalte Sonne (The Cold Sun), which scorches the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other alarmists. Co-authored with noted geologist/paleontologist Dr. Sebastian Lüning, the book was published by one of Germany’s premier book publishers and (amazingly) received hugely positive reviews in the major German media. On February 7, Germany’s leading daily newspaper, Bild (16 million circulation), devoted a half page to the Vahrenholt story, under the headline: “The CO2 Lie: Renowned team of scientists claim the climate catastrophe is fear-mongering by politics.” Bild followed up with a series of stories on Vahrenholt’s defection and the mounting evidence of massive fraud from the climate alarmists.

Germany’s flagship weekly news magazine Der Spiegel featured a four-page exclusive interview with Vahrenholt. Europe’s climate-alarmism industry was shellshocked. On June 18, two days before the opening of Rio+20, Vahrenholt sent another shock, with an op-ed in Britain’s Telegraph entitled “Global warming: second thoughts of an environmentalist.”

“For many years, I was an active supporter of the IPCC and its CO2 theory,” Vahrenholt wrote in the Telegraph. “Recent experience with the UN’s climate panel, however, forced me to reassess my position. In February 2010, I was invited as a reviewer for the IPCC report on renewable energy. I realised that the drafting of the report was done in anything but a scientific manner. The report was littered with errors and a member of Greenpeace edited the final version. These developments shocked me. I thought, if such things can happen in this report, then they might happen in other IPCC reports too.”

Vahrenholt faults the IPCC for, among other things, treating the solar influence on our climate as negligible. Current research by many scientists, he points out, indicates “it is really the Sun that shaped the temperature roller-coaster of the past 10,000 years.”

Crash Goes the “Consensus”

“All agree that climate change is an existential threat to humankind,” stated UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, before the UN’s 2009 Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. “All agree”? “Existential threat”? In this statement, the chief UN bureaucrat took the false “consensus” claim a quantum leap beyond even Al Gore’s lurid assertions. The Gore choir has been declaring for years that there is an overwhelming “consensus” among scientists that catastrophic AGW is real and imminent. According to Ban Ki-moon, we’ve gone beyond consensus to unanimity, and not just among scientists but “all,” presumably meaning every person on Earth agrees that global warming is a dire threat to humanity’s very existence. That, of course, is nonsense.

However, while Ban’s unanimity plea is easily recognizable as patently ridiculous, the consensus claim has bamboozled a great many people, including scientists who should know better. Aside from the fact that science is not determined by consensus, but by observation, experimentation, and measurement, the truth is that the AGW “consensus” involves a relatively small coterie of climate scientists who have been placed in key gatekeeper positions, enabling them to co-opt the claim of “scientific consensus” on AGW, while squashing dissenting voices and branding all dissenters as “cranks,” “outliers,” or, even, “deniers.” The use of the “denier” label is an especially odious tactic, intentionally aimed at smearing fellow scientists who dissent from AGW theory as equivalent to Holocaust deniers. The Climategate e-mails showed top climate activists at major universities and other institutions conspiring to punish scientists with opposing viewpoints and to prevent them from being published in the scientific literature. It also showed that they were going to great lengths to doctor their evidence to make it “prove” their preordained outcomes. What’s more, they have refused to make their data publicly available to scientific peers for independent review — as genuine scientific procedure demands — and when pressed on the issue, have claimed that the evidence has been “lost.” Some of the top names in climate alarmism — Michael Mann, Phil Jones, Kevin Trenberth, Rajendra Pachauri, Stephan Ramsdorf, James Hansen, Peter Gleick — demonstrated repeatedly that they are engaged in abusing science for a global political agenda.

The AGW consensus scam is one of the most astounding frauds in all of history, not only because it is patently false, but also because it is being used to propel the most sweeping and authoritarian scheme for global economic, social, and political regimentation the world has ever seen. This is not merely a theoretical scientific debate; the alleged “science” is being used to drive policy and legislation — at a global level. The policies they have already succeeded in imposing have caused devastating impacts, especially on the world’s poorest populations. The additional policies they propose would cause even more horrendous results. The AGW alarmists insist that “science has spoken,” and it is telling us, they say, that we must subject ourselves to UN-mandated global governance — which is to be determined, of course, by scientists who toe the UN-approved, IPCC-certified party line.

Although the liberal-left mainstream media has chosen to side with the climate alarmists, the other side of the story has been getting out through the alternative media. In April of this year, 49 former top NASA scientists and astronauts released a letter they had earlier sent to NASA administrator Charles Bolden expressing their belief that the claims of NASA, and specifically its Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), “that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated.”

A large number of noted climatologists, paleoclimatologists, meteorologists, atmospheric physicists, geophysicists, oceanographers, geologists, and scientists in virtually every field has been challenging the claims of the UN’s IPCC and vigorously denouncing the politicization of IPCC “science” to promote costly and draconian global policies. Some of the IPCC’s most severe critics are scientists who have served as lead authors and expert reviewers of IPCC reports and have witnessed from the inside the blatant bias and politics masquerading as science. Former and current IPCC experts who have spoken out against the IPCC’s abuse of science include such prominent scientists as:

Dr. John Christy, a climatologist of the University of Alabama in Huntsville and NASA;

Dr. Lee C. Gerhard, past director and state geologist with the Kansas Geological Society and a senior scientist emeritus of the University of Kansas;

Dr. Patrick J. Michaels, former Virginia State climatologist, a UN IPCC reviewer, and University of Virginia professor of environmental sciences;

Dr. Vincent Gray, New Zealand chemist and climate researcher;

Dr. Tom V. Segalstad, geologist/geochemist, head of the Geological Museum in Norway;

Dr. John T. Everett, a former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) senior manager and project manager for the UN Atlas of the Oceans.

The above-mentioned IPCC experts represent only a tiny subset of the scientists involved in the climate debate who take serious issue with the alarmist claims. More than 31,000 scientists in the United States have signed a petition urging the U.S. government to reject the kinds of AGW policies proposed by the UN and environmental extremists. The Petition Project, organized by Dr. Arthur Robinson of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine and Dr. Frederick Seitz, past president of the National Academy of Sciences, refutes claims that there is any kind of “consensus” regarding man-made global warming as a crisis or existential threat. The petition reads, in part:

The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind. There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.

More than 1,000 internationally renowned scientists have gone further; they have not merely signed a petition, but have made public statements challenging key claims of the AGW alarmists. Published in 2010, in a report by Marc Morano of ClimateDepot.com, this important collection of statements is an update of a similar report of 700 scientists’ statements published by Senator James Inhofe of the U.S. Senate Environment & Public Works Committee. The 1,000+ lineup of scientists reads like a Who’s Who of the global scientific community. It includes:

Dr. Ian D. Clark, Professor, isotope hydrogeology and paleoclimatology, University of Ottawa, Canada. Again, the aforementioned experts represent but a small sampling of the distinguished company of international scientific heavyweights who dispute the so-called AGW consensus. This is important to note, as the climate alarmists have gone to great lengths in using the logical fallacy of “argument by authority” to convince us that only right-wing whackos and illiterate wingnuts reject Al Gore’s “the science is settled” trope. The IPCC alarmists and their media allies never weary of telling us that the IPCC’s reports represent the views of 4,000 climate scientists who endorse the IPCC’s sense of crisis and alarm. However, as researcher John McLean reported in his 2009 study entitled “The IPCC Can’t Count Its ‘Expert Scientists’: Author and Reviewer Numbers Are Wrong,” the UN’s preeminent science body double-counts scientists and further pads their numbers by counting many non-scientific personnel who participate in the research assessments. Finally, the IPCC’s non-scientist policy wonks who write the political conclusions of the IPCC reports hijack whatever real science has been done by its qualified experts, falsely attributing a nonexistent consensus or unanimity to the scientific teams and ignoring the reservations or dissenting opinions of the non-conformists. McLean’s analysis, published by the Science & Public Policy Institute (SPPI), found that the “4,000 scientists” consensus claim for the IPCC’s 4th Assessment (2010) was spectacularly exaggerated. He notes:

Fifty-three authors and five reviewers are all that might generously be said to have explicitly supported the claim of a significant human influence on climate. Forget any notion that 4,000 scientists supported the claim or even the 3750+ people as mentioned by the IPCC. Also forget any notion that all 2890 individuals who were authors, reviewers or both supported the claim. The only explicit evidence is for support from just less than 60 individuals.

Please note, the number of scientists in the IPCC report that the organization may honestly be able to say have endorsed the IPCC’s AGW catastrophism, is more on the order of 50-60 individuals, not 4,000. That is a very significant discrepancy, to say the least! It has taken a long time for the thousands of AGW skeptics (or “climate realists,” as many prefer to be called) to come to the fore. Why is that? Astrophysicist Dr. Nir Shaviv of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a former AGW believer himself, says most scientists are so busy in their own specialties that, like most laymen, they don’t consider that the “consensus” may be completely contrived. But that has changed, he says. “Each one of us was working in his or her own niche,” says Shaviv. “While working there, each one of us realized that things just don't add up to support the AGW picture. So many had to change their views.”Until recently, the AGW alarmists definitely had the upper hand. For one thing, they have been organized. For another, they have been outspending the climate realists by a huge order of magnitude. In 2007, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the ranking member of the Environment & Public Works Committee, showed that proponents of man-made global warming enjoyed a monumental funding advantage over the skeptics. The alarmists had received a whopping $50 billion — mostly from the federal government — compared to “a paltry $19 million and some change” for the realists. A 2009 study entitled “Climate Money,” by Joanne Nova for the Science & Public Policy Institute, found that the U.S. government had sunk $79 billion into climate-change-related activities (science research, alternative energy technology, foreign aid, etc.) between 1989 and 2009. That total does not include additional massive funding from state governments, foundations, and corporations. Similar levels of funding have been poured into “climate policy” by European Union institutions and the national governments of European nations and Japan. This super-extravagant lavishing of state funding on a new scientific field has created an instant global climate industry that is government-fed and completely political. However, these sums, impressive as they are, represent only the very tip of the mountain of “climate cash” that has the political classes panting and salivating. They smell not only tens of billions of dollars for research and technology, but also hundreds of billions for “climate debt” foreign aid, and trillions to be made in CO2 cap-and-trade schemes.

The politicization and corruption of climate science is, perhaps, most clearly evident from the continuing cavalcade of shocking scandals: Climategate, Climate­gate 2.0, Himalayan Glaciergate, Alaskan Glaciergate, Amazongate, Sea Levelgate, Fakegate, Satellitegate, Antarctic Sea Icegate, Hockey Stickgate, Hurricanegate, Surface Weather Stationgate, Russiagate, etc. The Germany-based engineer P. Gosselin has catalogued 129 climate scandals at his website, NoTrickZone.com. Fortunately, each of these transgressions against the integrity of science has caused new circles of scientists to become aware of, and outraged by, the chicanery being employed by the political operatives masquerading as scientists. And the genuine scientists are stepping into the gap in increasing numbers to fight for truth and to expose the climate-change flim-flam artists who are perverting science.

The focus on military solutions to complex human problems has sidetracked humanity at the moment

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In the meantime, the credibility of the official reports on the 9/11 attacks (by the 9/11 Commission, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other government or government-appointed agencies) has been questioned by millions of citizens in the United States and abroad, including victim family members, expert witnesses and international legal experts...

The International Center for 9/11 Studies has therefore decided to sponsor four days of International Hearings in the city of Toronto, Canada on the 10th anniversary of the events of September 11, 2001. During these Hearings, which will be broadcasted via the Internet, various expert witnesses will present the best available evidence into the case, discovered in the ten years since the 9/11 events occurred...

Objectives of the Hearings:

(1) To present evidence that the U.S. government’s official investigation into the events of September 11, 2001, as pursued by various government and government-appointed agencies, is seriously flawed and has failed to describe and account for the 9/11 events.

(2) To single out the most weighty evidence of the inadequacy of the U.S. government’s investigation; to organize and classify that evidence; to preserve that evidence; to make that evidence widely known to the public and to governmental, non-governmental and inter-governmental organizations.

(3) To submit a record and a summary of the Hearings, together with signed Statutory Declarations by witnesses, to relevant governments, groups and international agencies with the request that a full and impartial investigation be launched into the events of September 11, 2001, which have been used to initiate military invasions and to restrict the rights of citizens.

(4) To engage the attention of the public, the international community and the media through witness testimony as well as through media events broadcasted via the Internet during the four day event.

In the US on September 11, 2011, the tenth anniversary of 9/11, politicians and their presstitute media presented Americans with “A Day of Remembrance,” a propaganda exercise that hardened the 9/11 lies into dogma. Meanwhile, in Toronto, Canada, at Ryerson University the four-day International Hearings on the Events of September 11, 2001, came to a close at 5pm...

The NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology, a government agency) reports on the twin towers and building 7 are fraudulent. Witnesses at the Toronto Hearings proved that building 7 was a standard controlled demolition and that incendiaries and explosives brought down the twin towers. There is no doubt whatsoever about this. Anyone who declares the contrary has no scientific basis upon which to stand. Those who defend the official story believe in miracles that defy the laws of physics...

Many other powerful points were made at the conference that I will not report, at least not at this time, because the revelation of malevolence is so powerful that most readers will find it a challenge to their emotional and mental strength...

Psychologists explained that there are two kinds of authority to which people submit. One is to the authority of people in high positions in the government. The belief that “our government wouldn’t lie to us” is pervasive, especially among patriots. The other source of authority is experts. However, to believe experts a person has to be educated and open-minded and to trust scientific, professional, and scholarly integrity

Yeh I remember those days. As long as the continent of Antarctica exists at the southern pole of our planet we probably will be repeatedly pulled back into glacial ice ages due to 100,000 year cycle variations in the shape of Earth's elliptical orbit. They had all sorts of evidence; coral reef, ice cores, tree rings, from memory. Has this changed in the last 20 years?

If anyone takes their investment leads from magazines like Newsweek and Time then they really do deserve the mediocre returns they are more than likely scoring. Not only is any news that finally makes it into such publications already well and truly priced into the market, people writing those articles and headlines typically make the fundamental mistake of applying straight line extrapolation to "see" into the future.

Yes there were scientists back then that were concerned that we may be looking at a cooling cycle. Of course there are scientists today who think that is still likely and there are some who think we may suffer a repeat of the Younger Dryas cooling period when the Gulf Stream goes into reverse. But using the best science available to us today, the overwhelming bulk of climate scientists think there is a better chance that the climate is trending towards warmer times.

Now if you honestly believe that climate change and sustainability are a crock of shit then by all means invest on that basis. I happen to believe that there a reasonable probability that there really is some momentum and substance behind such things as climate change, sustainability, peak oil, peak soil, peak water, over-population, and as such there is a strong bias in what I invest in.

Here are recent comments by the US Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu (who happens to be a nobel laureate in physics):

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In response to a question about why the government was shutting down the space program at a time it was also trying to encourage students to study engineering, Chu said that sustainability provides a bigger challenge than going to the moon — again. "The space program played its role," Chu said. "Here's something that's much bigger."

"A generation of Americans were trained in the aftermath of Sputnik," Chu said.

He added that a similar sense of urgency is needed now as the U.S. competes with the rest of the world — most notably China — for leadership in clean energy.

"We can't take leadership in anything for granted," he said....

Deans from four U.S. university engineering schools echoed Chu's sentiment that energy independence is the current generation's Sputnik moment, agreeing that the next Steve Jobs is likely to come from the energy field.

Here is a link to a 1975 Newsweek article "The Cooling World" which states "Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend as well as its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climate change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic."

The last sentence of the article says it all, only a generation ago it was global cooling, not warming, "The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climate change once the results become a grim reality."

The sky is falling again. If only we could protect ourselves from the arrogant certainty of the media and scientific experts who say "trust us, we are certain we've diagnosed the problem and have THE answer." Now, if the "solution" is implemented worldwide, it could cost us trillions of dollars.

The Maths has all been done for the reader, so even Tony should understand what it's about. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------But does Julia understand what collective economic damage is being done to Australia generated by the resultant new taxes?

Maybe worth sending to every MP, especially those "skeptics" still in denial. The Maths has all been done for the reader, so even Tony should understand what it's about.

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I trade daily, but I am not a licensed adviser. Whether you find my ideas reasonable or not: The only person responsible for your actions is YOU.I follow two rules: (1) There are no sacred truths. All assumptions must be critically examined. Arguments from authority are worthless. (2) Whatever is inconsistent with observed facts must be discarded or revised. We must understand the Market as it is and not confuse how it is with how we wish it to be. (inspired by Carl Sagan)